I feel a little guilty to admit that as someone who has been quite deeply involved in the IGF from its inception, I find myself taking little interest in the open consultation meetings nowadays. After all, nothing ever seems to change... or if it does, so terribly slowly.

At this week's meeting (demoted by the Secretariat from an open consultation to a "planning meeting"), business lobbyist Marilyn Cade, who must be on auto-pilot at these meetings, came out again in opposition to moves to formalise and strengthen the linkage of dynamic coalitions to the IGF, and was backed up as usual by the supposedly-neutral Advisory Group Chair, Nitin Desai.

Will it be another five years before the IGF gains the confidence to allow the dynamic coalitions the status they ought to have had from the beginning? Until then, those of them that are still active at all are achieving precious little, and have no influence outside the IGF's own rarified circle.

The conversation then moved to remote participation, which is one of the areas in which I first assisted through the Online Collaboration Dynamic Coalition (OCDC), now defunct after being white-anted by a couple of dissidents. Many of the suggestions that the OCDC had made have since been revisited by others, and this continued at this meeting. On the other hand, mistakes continue also to be made.

On the positive side, Desai acknowledged the need for what I had previously called a rapporteur between the online participants and those present in person - which he has called a "comoderator for the remote participation". This would address the serious disconnect between these two communities, which other Internet governance organisations such as the IETF and W3C have never suffered, due to the much more integral role their online communities play.

The DimDim Webcasting software that was used last time will be replaced with WebEx. Whilst I wasn't a big fan of DimDim - it is much less lightweight and standardised than the Jabber chat or IRC that other organisations use - at least it is based on an open source code base, which WebEx isn't. As Andrea Saks noted, it's also not accessible, as IRC and Jabber are.

Another old OCDC request, the need for a two-way chat in the venue, for example, was emphasised by one speaker. Mr Narani of the host country, who also recommended the use of Jabber chat, mentioned the usefulness of a downloadable calendar - a facility that I have offered from igf-online.net for several years. (But I have grow tired of the Secretariat's refusal to publicise or link to this resource, and plan to deregister it or pass it to someone who can achieve more success with it than I or the OCDC were able to.) Narani also wisely observed that

remote participants should be treated equally to people inside. We say that we will about ten people in the audience called, and they will not be counted as people who are physically doing questions. Because we have to take two questions from the floor and one question from remote participants. We have to find a balance to give the opportunity for them to participate.